Contents

Prerequisites

Get the command line tool "xar". Some debian based systems have it, try apt-get install xar. If not found, get it from http://code.google.com/p/xar/ (I needed package libxml2-dev to compile it) (I also needed openssl-dev to compile it on Ubuntu 10.10)

To install xar in a recent Debian/Ubuntu system and it isn't found via apt-get, you can download these packages and install them manually: Ubuntu: libxar1, xar Debian: libxar1, xar

You will need to have git installed to retrieve files from the WIDK repository.

Building the pkg file requires Curl and libbz2-dev

Since you're planning to write native software for webOS, this assumes you have things like gcc and make and normal developer stuff like that.

We will be using tools found in the WIDK cross-compile repository is really helpful as it already has functionality to download and extract the OSX PDK, most of which will "just work" on Linux. Tools found in the WIDK repository can also download the CodeSourcery toolchain for Linux to replace the one included in the PDK, built for Darwin.

Setup

Get the Palm PDK using the Webos-Internals makefile

This downloads Palm's DMG file, downloads and patches a tool for converting DMG's, and runs it against the Palm DMG, ending up with a Xar format package file. (filename ends in .pkg)

Someone who is familiar with the PDK should test this at this point to see if you can actually use it in the proper ways.

Alternative setup

The github project linux-webos-pdk automates the process of creating a webOS PDK for Linux. The only requirements are wget, 7zip, pax and patch. All these requirements are available even in Debian Stable (So I guess all other distributions provide them, too).